Question

I´m trying to hold the iteration number in vars, but as you know, xQuery vars are immutable

There´s an special syntax like

for $film at $i in doc('films.xml')/films/film
return <film>{$i}.{data($film/@title)}</film>

My problem is, how to hold the value of the absolute iteration when a loop is inside another loop.

for $film at $i in doc('films.xml')/films/film
for $goofs at $j in $film/goofs/goof
return **total_absolute_number_goof** 

I mean I dont need

i=1 j=1,2,3            i=1 j=1,2,3
i=2 j=1,2,3...  but    i=2 j=4,5,6

Is there any easy way to achieve that in xquery?

EDIT: java equivalent

int j = 0;
for (;some_external_condition;) 
   for (;some_external_condition;j++) {}
//j would print number of total iterations

Answer 1

There’s a feature in XQuery 3.0 to do this:

for $film at $i in doc('films.xml')/films/film
for $goofs at $j in $film/goofs/goof
count $k
return $k

It’s already been added to some XQuery processors, for example Saxon-EE 9.4.

In XQuery 1.0 I think you would need two passes: first create the list of films, then number them.